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Talking Tough, Singing Sweetly

ASHANTI is an old-fashioned pop star. She dresses no more revealingly than Britney Spears, and her videos aren't nearly as provocative. She doesn't doesn't curse much and her mother plays an active role in her career, calling herself Ashanti's ''momager.'' Near the end of Ashanti's debut album, the singer's little sister Kenashia phones in a heartfelt message of encouragement: ''I'm glad that your dreams are finally coming true.''

And yet Ashanti, at 21 the most popular young singer in the country today, is also the first lady of Murder Inc., a hip-hop label built around the rapper Ja Rule.

''We're, like, murdering everyone in the industry,'' Ashanti said, curling up in a bed in a Manhattan hotel. She smiled when she realized how it sounded. ''It's not like we're going in and shooting them. We're trying to murder the industry with our artists, by making hot records.''

Ashanti doesn't have a wide vocal range, but she knows enough not to sing too much; she gets out of the way to let the beats and tunes and stories do their work. When her debut album, ''Ashanti'' (Murder Inc./Island Def Jam), was released last month, it went straight to No. 1, selling a half-million copies its first week.

It's impossible to talk about Ashanti's career without getting tripped up by hip-hop rhetoric. She wrote much of her album at the Crackhouse, Murder Inc.'s recording studio in Greenwich Village. (''In the industry, that's what they call a hit record -- a crack,'' she said.) And her most popular song is ''Always on Time,'' a duet with Ja Rule in which the rapper declares, ''This pimp game is very religious.''

This isn't exactly the path to success that Ashanti and her momager, Tina Douglas, had planned. Ashanti Douglas grew up in Glen Clove, on Long Island, where she didn't seem much like a future Murderer. An honor student and track standout, she was accepted by Hampton University and scouted by Princeton, she says, but chose music instead.

Her father, Thomas Douglas, is a former singer, and right from the start, Ashanti was groomed for a career in entertainment, dancing and modeling until she discovered, at age 12, that she could sing. Remembering this discovery, Ashanti tells a story that she has often told before, about a day when she was vacuuming and singing to herself. Ms. Douglas heard her and rushed downstairs, ready to scold her for listening to the radio when she wasn't supposed to be. When she realized it was Ashanti's voice that she had heard, a new career plan was born.

The world of child stardom is perhaps even more clannish and cut-throat than the world of hip-hop, and Ashanti is a show-business veteran. She's fluent in industry jargon -- ''We threw my record out as a white-label,'' she says, using the term for a single that is not officially released -- and she prides herself on being ''a quick interview.'' She reminisces about record deals the way some young women reminisce about boyfriends. There was a fling with Jive in high school, and after she graduated she moved to Atlanta so that she could be with Noontime, a subsidiary of Epic.

When her relationship with Noontime didn't work out, she came back to New York, to try again. Almost by chance, she scored a meeting with Irv Gotti, the scowling chief executive of Murder Inc., who was so impressed that he offered her the hip-hop version of an apprenticeship: the chance to sing choruses -- known as hooks -- for rappers. Her first success was ''How We Roll,'' by Big Pun, in which she sang about how he was ''straight out of the projects.''

If ''How We Roll'' established Ashanti as a pretty voice, it was ''Always on Time'' that established her as a character. The song unfolds as a tug-of-war between Ashanti and Ja Rule, who acknowledge their infidelity to each other while pledging their devotion. Ja Rule points out that his lover gives as good as she gets, and he reminds her of ''The stormy night you wrote a 'Dear Ja' letter/ And took my Benz and keyed and cut the leather.''

When Ashanti sings back, her voice is sweet and guileless, but her words suggest that she has her own secrets: ''I'm not always there when you call, but I'm always on time.''

The song was a smash, and it earned her enough money to go Christmas shopping at Gucci. ''I bought, like, 12 bags,'' she recalled, although she confessed that not all of them were gifts.

Ashanti kept her streak alive by delivering new episodes of the soap opera that was begun with ''Always on Time.'' The new album begins with a voice saying, ''Previously, on Ashanti . . . ,'' followed by snippets from all of her hits.

Her first solo single was ''Foolish,'' a stream-of-consciousness narrative about a woman who loves her man too much to leave him: ''Even when I pack my bags, there's always something holding me back.'' It was another hit -- people wanted to know how the story ended.

The album is engaging but cautious, a collection of midtempo relationship songs that doesn't seem distinctive enough to have inspired Ashanti's sudden success. Part of the credit has to go to Def Jam, which engineered a program that offered retailers a $2 rebate for every album sold in the first two weeks.

''We put gasoline in the carburetor,'' said Lyor Cohen, the president and chief executive of the Island Def Jam Music Group.

This program helped push Ashanti's sales past those of Tweet, a more adventurous R & B singer, whose album was released the same day.

A few years ago, people still talked about hip-hop acts ''going pop,'' and someone like Ashanti might have been an impossible contradiction: too clean-cut to please rap fans and too closely identified with thuggish imagery to please the mainstream. When the hip-hop impresario Sean (Puffy) Combs launched a teen-pop act Dream, the group's limited success was overshadowed by a sense of incongruity: it wasn't clear why Mr. Combs was suddenly interested in these four girls. Now he is touring with 'N Sync, and his fans aren't complaining. What once seemed like a contradiction now seems more like shrewd marketing, and the gap between singers and rappers no longer seems so wide.

Ashanti doesn't worry too much about her unlikely affiliation with Murder Inc. She said she liked her role as ''a female R & B singer, signed to such a thugged-out label,'' and her album is filled with reminders that she's not quite as sweet as she seems. More important, the match makes musical sense. ''It's a balance,'' she said, when asked to describe the appeal of her duets with Ja Rule. ''You have a melody, a pretty singing voice up in there, and then you have your hard, thugged-out, voice.''

The combination of a pretty singing voice and a hard rapping voice is becoming a genre unto itself, thanks in part to Murder Inc. In February, Gwen Stefani, the lead singer of No Doubt, and the rapper Eve won the first Grammy for ''Best Rap/Sung Collaboration.'' A few months ago, Jay-Z and R. Kelly released ''The Best of Both Worlds,'' the first major rapper-singer album. And last week, 11 of the 40 most popular songs in the country were rapper-singer collaborations. Five of them featured Ashanti, Ja Rule or both.

Ja Rule makes only one appearance on ''Ashanti.'' The bigger musical influences are Irv Gotti, Chink Santana and a producer known as 7, who compose most of the tracks. They use fragments of keyboards and strings to reinforce the soap-opera atmosphere, and they keep the backbeats sharp to emphasize her relationship to hip-hop.

Murder Inc. has crowned Ashanti ''The Princess of Hip-hop and R & B.'' The queen is still, presumably, Mary J. Blige. Ashanti cites Ms. Blige as an early inspiration, but their singing styles couldn't be more different. Ms. Blige forged a forceful style that draws from gospel and the blues, while Ashanti sounds more like Aaliyah, whose voice was breath-mint cool.

On a recent rainy weekend, Ashanti was the main attraction at the Brooklyn Cafe, a no-frills nightclub on Flatbush Avenue, near the Manhattan Bridge. It was almost three o'clock in the morning, Mr. Gotti had the microphone, and he was shouting about some woman who had been beat up. It turned out that the woman was Celine Dion, and the attack was figurative: he was gloating about the fact that Ashanti had knocked Ms. Dion off the top of the charts.

A few minutes earlier, Ashanti had been in a grimy little dressing room, listening to reggae and dancing with her mother. Now she was sharing the stage with a few dozen rappers, executives and acquaintances from the Murder Inc. family. She asked the crowd how many women were tired of their men coming home late. That was the cue for ''Unfoolish,'' a sequel to ''Foolish'' in which the woman finally leaves her man. ''I can't keep running back to you,'' she sang, and everyone sang along -- the audience, her mother, her hair stylist, even Irv Gotti. The song ends with the woman saying, ''I'm leaving you tonight.'' It has a ring of finality, but like all good cliff-hangers, it's really a set-up for the next episode.